Enterprise 2.0 conference continuing to evolve

I’ve increased my attendance at E2.0 by 100% by going two
years in a row; okay, that was a bad metrics joke. The Enterprise2.0 conference in
Boston was the big gathering of customers, analysts, bloggers and
aficionados this year. We’re still debating how many people really attended but
I’m guessing it is around a thousand.

The week began early for me starting with presenting during
the Black Belt practitioner’s workshop on Monday. I’m proud of my fellow
members of The 2.0 Adoption Council who presented the workshops all day long.
There are about 10 speakers, starting in the morning with the effervescent Jamie Pappas (EMC) speaking on
business value; the cheery Megan
Murray (Booz Allen Hamilton) on planning; and myself on adoption. The afternoon
had a several pairs of speakers: Stan Garfield (Deloitte) and Luis Suarez (IBM) on community building;
Donna Cuomo (MITRE) and Ted Hopton
(UBM) on metrics and analysis; Bryce
Williams (Eli Lilly) and Richard Rashty (Schneider Electric) on positioning
tools; and Bart Schutte (St Gobain) and Kevin Jones (NASA) on mitigating risks.

I’m also thrilled so many people stayed from 8:30am till
4:15pm. It really is a fire hose of knowledge, even when spread across so many
hours. These were real issues and scenarios that the speakers have experienced
in trying to bring Enterprise2.0 to life in their own organizations.

Has E2.0 gained ground? I definitely think so. For any idea
to take hold, there needs to be stability in what it means, and increasing
adoption and expression of the notions within it. Seeing The 2.0 Adoption
Council’s rapid growth within just one year (with over 100 member large
companies) worldwide, with active practitioners is one area of social proof.
The other is the reduction of “What is it?” and more of “How do we do it?”

E2.0 seems to be entrenched in the domain of the CIO and IT
organizations. That’s a shame because it really does spread across many
domains. Gautam Ghosh lamented the
lack of attendees or speakers from the HR realm in a few tweets during the
event. Yet many of the talks were certainly around employee behavior and
engagement.

I have to be honest. There are many things that are still
left unanswered this year. I didn’t expect solutions but I was looking for more
thought on the following ideas:

ROI -
Surprisingly, I agree with Dennis
Howlett. I don’t think people should be looking for a single answer or
approach to figuring this out. What was being affirmed is that are some
cases of ROI particularly in the external or public-facing environments,
but very rare for internal enterprise 2.0 environments. However, most
examples of an approach to ROI I know are still very specific to scenarios
that cannot be easily replicated. The industry going through its period of
denial – “Don’t try to look for ROI”—but organizations still need that.

Privacy
and Personally Identifying Information – I raised this last year at the
conference, and it was great that there was at least one session by Carl
Frappollo (Information Architected, Inc) that described the interviews and
study he did early this year on this subject. The focus was very
Euro-centric because of the specifics of several countries there with
intense legal scrutiny in this area.

Carl’s point about organizations along the following interest scale--‘Big
S’ security, ‘small c’ collaboration, and ‘Big C’ collaboration--certainly
described the differing views on the legal fog organizations face.

Adoption
is about transforming human behaviors at work – More folks are starting to
recognize that it is not trivial to bring communities and other social
environment to life. There were numerous cases talking about adoption
including my own part of the workshop. I’ve heard several different philosophies:

the
fascist / ‘Hitler’ approach (as described by the speaker) of mandating
that people use these tools;

the
‘taking the toys away’ – removing alternatives so they have no choice but
to use social tools.

the
carrot principle through monetary rewards or a point system to purchase
goods – apparently some folks still have that available.

‘Let’s
get beyond “adoption”’ – This was another sentiment I heard several times,
but I attribute it to short-attention span. The general statement was
‘adoption’ was last-year’s thing, and we needed a new ‘thing’. As evident
from our own experience which my excellent peer Jeanne Murray and I
described, adoption goes through many stages of evolution. Each step
people need new things, and you need new adoption tactics. The big-picture
Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t happen in a year, although you can achieve many
small wins.

External
Social Media vs. Enterprise 2.0 – I think people are starting to agree
that working with the external audience entirely is a different context
than Enterprise 2.0. I did hear several questions to this front, so this
distinction hasn’t completely permeated yet.

“Grassroots
tend to get weedkiller put on it” – I quote Oliver Marks (ZDNet, Sovos
Group) here. E2.0 adoption efforts without official executive support do
not tend to last long. This goes along with the next realization.

E2.0
transformation teams even in large companies are small and understaffed –
I made a joke: “For a global organization of about 400,000 people, I think
the right size [for an E2.0 team] is about 7 or 8.”The reality is that most organizations
have only one person working on it if they are lucky. Frankly I think that
this is a recipe for failure because a single person, even with some
volunteer help, would find such an organization-wide transformation truly
monumental. However, this is a catch-22 / paradox: You can’t get more
staff until you can prove its value, but you need people to help you prove
that value.

Small
and Medium Businesses have different problems than large organizations – I
heard this brought up only once, but I think it is a very important
statement in reflection of the last point. The large companies, including
our own, can afford to have experts staffed to focus on Enterprise 2.0.
SMBs with only a thousand people or so don’t have that luxury.

“There
has to be something for everyone” – The speaker (I don’t recall who) was
making a point mostly that individuals need to feel the impact to see the
value. However, I want to elevate that the pendulum can’t swing entirely
to focus on the individual. Too much emphasis on gaining organizational
value can lead to poor adoption, but too little focus on it deemphasizes
the business reasons to support such a significant transformation project.

Community
Maturity and Lifecycle models – This was a gaping hole. I’m of the school
of thought that there are many different archetypes for social
environments. Yet, many describe theirs as if it is the answer, or
use their single case to refute other claims. Thomas Van der Wal’s wrap-up on continuing
myths per this conference revisits the participation inequality
principle made famous, but not originated by, Jakob Nielsen—the 90% are
lurkers/readers, 9% are contributers but 1% are intense contributors.

Some activity metrics case studies in our organizations have shown that it
really depends on the goals of the communities. For example, some are
decidedly intended as only an outlet for information albeit in a more
social sphere; others focus on intense rewriting of content.

Yet, these myths persist often because the metrics systems are quite poor,
and they look at the external social media context, not internal
interaction within the organization. A great weakness is the inability to
uniquely distinguish who is participating in a community and the different
forms of participation actions beyond just reads and writes. In the
external world, with the possibility of endless different users, this
might be more of a reality, but within the boundaries of known employees
in org E2.0, the clarity of detail reshapes how we see this. There are
many other factors: affinity to the community, time within member’s
workflow to participate, recognizable value and outcomes for the member,
rhythms of activity.

It will still take a bit of time, or if at all, we can
figure on better patterns of a maturity lifecycle, but let’s not jump to
default conclusions simply because it is easy to remember.

Re HR, there were actually about 15 of us there. <div>&nbsp;</div>
I agree there should be more, but the conference will probably need
to be redesigned first eg to reduce the proportion of product demos
in the keynotes. <div>&nbsp;</div>
I actually submitted a proposal to talk about the need to bring IT,
HR and other functions together to make e 2.0 work: <div>&nbsp;</div>
http://boston2010.e2conf.spigit.com/Idea/View?ideaid=46 <div>&nbsp;</div>
<div>&nbsp;</div>
Perhaps Santa Clara instead? <div>&nbsp;</div>
<div>&nbsp;</div>
Jon Ingham <br />
Strategic HCM <div>&nbsp;</div>
http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/search/label/HR%202.0 <br />